When We Go to the Ocean is about the discussions we have with our friends and family once we have made travel plans. We say, “When we go to the ocean, we will ______.”

When We Go to the Sky was painted after the one above. The title was a creative leap; some call it the angels landing on our shoulder that happens when we pay attention to our imagination while we work. Another way of saying it is, “The topic came out of the blue.”

The motif in both paintings is a return to a shape that I used for my entry in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Jethro Tull Coreopsis. The concept was a stem and flower and I utilized the patterns from historical patchwork-quilts. The title is after Jethro Tull  (the agriculturist who perfected the seed drill) and the red and yellow colours found in the coreopsis flower.

For the paintings, I see the shape as a thought bubble and a continuation of various patchwork-quilt designs I have worked with.  From their titles, the paintings might appear to foretell the longing for travel that has come about because of the pandemic. When I painted them, if there was any mention of a pandemic, only a very few could have imagined how the virus would take hold. Now there are vacations available that fly around in the sky, sometimes at low elevations for aerial sightseeing, only to land at their departure point many hours later. While both paintings are about travel plans, the title When We Go to the Sky in particular, is an example of how a painting can take on new meaning with the passage of time.